Oh hi there, patch 3.3 in FFXIV. Logged in around 4:30 this morning to scope it out and my Free Company boss-lady asks me how much money I have. Before I start thinking she wants monies to get a bigger guild house (because a mess of new housing plots were added), it turns out it’s the other way around: she’s giving me money so I can get my own house, as a loyalty reward and also for my care and feeding of everyone’s chocobos.

I wasn’t planning on trying to get my own house, as I already had a room in the guild house, but if she’s offering… :P (Also, Tarrika isn’t exactly someone who takes no for an answer.)

True, it’s a small house (a Cottage, if you must use the proper term) and it’s the same size as our guild house, but… it’s my house. Theoretically I could share with 3 other people; most likely one of them will be Bonnie if she actually cared about housing.

Obviously, uh, I had to dye (paint?) my house dark blue, and I made the bushy fencing and got an Aetherlyte so I can teleport back here, except there isn’t much else here (retainer bell, etc.) yet because I’m totally cleaned out of money. :P Tarrika’s going to be making a bunch of furniture on demand later today, I’ll see if I can get a Riviera canopy bed so I can replicate my bedroom from the FC house on a slightly bigger scale. Most likely I’ll keep Dodo stabled at the guild house to make it easier to mass-feed the chocobos.

If you’re on Faerie server, my house is in the Lavender Beds, Ward 31, #56.

Today’s topic: the drama about proposed “bathroom laws” and why it’s a thinly-veiled excuse to punish transgendered people (also, you don’t REALLY care about women being raped)

It’s, like… why is transgendered folks using the bathroom a problem now? They’ve been doing it for years and not much, if any fuss, has been made over it. Only now is it becoming a capital-I issue and, as you can expect, a lot of the naysayers are throwing caution to the wind and letting their hateful flags fly.

The main argument against letting trans people continue as they were is that it would supposedly “let men put on a wig and dress and attack women in the bathroom.” Hi, this happens already. A law or rule enforcing “each gender to their own bathroom” will not put up a forcefield around the doors, scanning everyone to verify their gender. Someone determined to sexually assault another person is going to follow them into the bathroom, rules and laws be damned, full stop.

How would you even enforce such a law, anyway? Hire someone to stand at the door for the sole purpose of verifying one’s gender? For one thing, that would cost money, which of course no site owner will want to eat, so they’ll either bake it into their prices (if a store/restaurant), cut wages, eliminate services, or directly charge for access. Yeah, that’s going to go over well. And, of course, any backlash will cause people to point their fingers (wrongly) at trans people, as if they needed any more reason to inflict scorn and (likely) violence.

Also, people forget that same-gender assault is VERY much a thing. Women attack each other in the bathroom, men attack each other in the bathroom. Pedophiles, who statistically gravitate towards younger boys, attack their victims in the bathroom.

The secondary argument is just outright discomfort and/or transphobia. This one I am marginally less critical of, because at least there’s some shred of honesty (and I have relatively more respect for someone who is honest about their bigotry as opposed to someone who would hide behind religion and other platitudes), but there are a mess of counters for it. You have most likely used the same bathroom as a transgendered person at one point, without realizing it. How many people actually make eye contact with another person in the bathroom, anyway? Most of us just want to get in and out of there as quickly as possible, we don’t really have time to be looking over someone to see if they’re the “correct” gender. Someone who might be trans but doesn’t COMPLETELY pass, well, I might do a brief, quiet double take (because human curiosity) but otherwise go about my business.

A transgendered person is no different from us, they want to get their business over with and be on their way. Why should we make it harder for them, unless it is just a latent desire to punish them? If the naysayers have their way, the end result will backfire SO HARD, because you really would have, oh, a pre-transitioned man in the women’s bathroom. The awkward facepalm is so real.

“Oh, but loopholes! Someone could put on a wig and–” Well, they do that now. Report creepers to security. Carry pepper spray. Learn self-defense! There are existing laws against this behavior! We don’t need to police transgendered folks over a hypothetical (and a statistically-rare, almost impossible) situation that happens more often with straight folks and those of the same gender.

I feel like the sudden concern about women and girls’ safety in the bathroom comes off as disingenuous and even hypocritical. We sadly have a terrible track record when it comes to prevention, investigation and prosecution of sexual assault (as well as support for victims). People (men, really) playing the “safety of women” card don’t really care about stopping the assault on women in the bathroom, because they aren’t willing to go the full distance to actually correct the problem. If you want to really stop women from being raped in the bathroom, you don’t put into place laws against transgendered people, you do things like, oh, teach men to NOT RAPE, for starters. You would take victims seriously, you would actually put funding and effort into investigating and prosecuting those who commit such crimes.

Finally, there are other reasons why unisex bathrooms should be a thing (on top of not bellyaching over transgendered people): single fathers with young or infant daughters, parents of disabled children, people with elderly disabled parents, to name some. Are we going to screw them over some bigotry? I hope not.

You know who IS willing to screw unrelated portions of the population over their bigotry, though: the Lt. Governor of Texas, who is so bent on digging in his heels over this nonsense that he’s going to defy the recent presidential directive to quit interfering with transgendered people’s access to the bathroom. That’s right, he’s so dedicated to his hate that he would sacrifice federal funding for schools to feed it. A lot of that money goes to the free/reduced lunch program there, so he is effectively going to make a lot of children go hungry. He claims that the state will find replacement funds, but we all know that schools are among the first things on the budgetary chopping block, so they’re most likely going to have to go without. What the actual fuck, Texas? Of course, this will also lead to blame unfairly being dumped on transgendered kids for ruining it for everyone, right?

Who’s got two thumbs, a big mug of milk, and goes months without posting here?

Me. This derp. Yep.

Anyway, today is, I suppose, the… 15th anniversary of Ayarane Project? Technically I bought the domain in late April 2001 but the hosting didn’t get finalized until May 5. No reason to dump it now! (I have, also, considered picking up a bunch of “ayarane”-flavored domains but… too lazy to set up redirects and such.)

15 years of Yoshi and derping and fun! Let’s add 15 more onto the pile!

Playing a lot of FFXIV (and WoW too, less so because “end of expansion content drought” but really the only thing I’m burned out on is spamming LFR for legendary ring progress, which is why I’m so lazy about finishing the ring on my non-Yoshi/Phil alts). Met me a new leveling buddy in there, a cute Lalafell Black Mage/Ninja by the name of Bonnie and it’s been pretty nice. :D Also kinda got recruited into her Free Company (guild) even though I had been dodging those for months, and it’s not terrible! I’ve become their Chocobo Lady– while I’m logged in, I feed all the stabled Chocobos on cooldown– and it’s not gone unnoticed, as their boss-lady promoted me because of it.

I mean, I’m not particularly gunning for officer-rank here, but it does get me full access to guild storage, so that’s kinda nice. :P

In real space, uh, nothing really to blab about beyond the tired “parental management is taken all of my money to clean up their shit, and feeding me lies about how I’ll see maybe a fraction of it again” because, yeah, nobody reeeeeally wants to hear that again. When you don’t want to play video games and you want to go out a bit, go to Team Building Activities in Dallas.

So art happened! I even streamed a couple sessions, though the second time I kept dropping my connection. And while it took quite awhile, I did finish it.

Also: HAPPY FLOWER CAKE.

The next one, despite what I said earlier, I may actually attempt to do entirely on the iPad Pro. I think part of my problem is that when I run into “oh this doesn’t work the way I’m used to” problems with those apps is that I’d sooner just shoot the file over to Blastoise rather than dig in my heels to find a workable solution where I am. I mean, I know in the big picture both units have to work together for a high-quality, well-polished piece, buuut… I DID get this thing so I can draw on it, you know? And I should actually try to DO that rather than just make a token scribble and then fall back on Blastoise since it’s more comfortable/less intimidating there.

I’ve been in a slump for a long, long time, art-wise. It’s at the point where I’m lucky if I can eke out a couple things a year, now I don’t even have time to go to the vape trade show that I like so much.

And, frankly, that’s really terrible. Like, TRULY terrible. I tout myself as a painter as part of my personal identity, and yet in recent years I have so little to show for it. (Aside from commissions, which I don’t really count because money is involved, this is about art I do for me.)

Tonight, in trying to jumpstart my inspiration (since holiday season is fast approaching, as well as the day I get my Apple Pencil to complete my iPad Pro), I went diving through my Snowschemes– holiday art for Ragnarok TWILIGHT, a mega-AU for the MMORPG Ragnarok Online. Piles and piles of art JUST for the Christmas subplot. At least 3-4 pieces a year, and those were done solely within the month of December!

The last Snowscheme was 2 years ago. Only one. ONLY ONE. Disgraceful.

I can explain it away all I want: getting older, being distracted by other games/hobbies, depression/anxiety sapping my energy, focus and creativity, being more easily tired because of disability… but those are explanations, not solutions. I need to pry myself out of this pit of despair if I want to continue to identify as a painter. I know that having my iPad Pro+Pencil will better facilitate more art, but that’s really only part of the solution, because I do know that whatever I do there needs to get sent up to Blastoise for final polishing.

And equally as important is consistency. It has to be a regular thing. And I think I have a workable, viable and not-too-tedious solution for that: Twitch recently added their Creative aspect, which essentially reinstates streaming access for artists and such. I already have the software in place to do it (OBS), and as of this writing, Mondays are completely open– no raids or other commitments around the 5pm Pacific timeslot. I can do that, I can stream for a few hours. Even if nobody shows up to watch (though it would be nice if a few did). All I have to do is at least start with a wireframe, else I’ll be spending half the time putzing around on a blank canvas and making an idiot of myself. If I start from a wireframe, odds are it will stick and you can see some actual progression on the stream.

It’s Wednesday night, so I have until next Monday to hype myself up and get a wireframe in place.